Word: auden
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...pals mark the end of an intellectual era-the era of Utopian belief in man's earthly salvation through socialism and sociology, related to the igth century evolutionary notion that history is a process of perpetual improvement. That era's brilliant, fashionable upper-class leftists-Auden, Ishenvood, Spender et al.-are dismissed by Amis and Co. as playboys on a slumming party. The "new men" have actually been poor, and understandably they smirk when they pick up the memoirs of a posh erstwhile pink like Philip Toynbee (son of A Study of History'> Arnold J.) and read...
...call the Spanish War a joke because so many people were deceived by it. "Curiously enough," he wrote, "the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings." In following years he kept railing at the verbal beginnings of political dishonesty: Auden's talk of "necessary murder" in Spain, the Munich-era optimism of the Chamberlinian press (described in Coming Up For Air), Pig Napoleon's famous motto that "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." He kept emphasizing that there is a truth to all things...
...their hypocritical elders. In the '30s the worker at the barricades shook his fist at the bloated capitalist. In the '40s the man of freedom locked wills with the totalitarian zealot. In the '50s the basic confrontation - which all along has preoccupied writers, including W. H. Auden, Graham Greene. T. S. Eliot-may well be that of the psychiatrist and the man of God. Germany's Friedrich Deich. 49, is not professionally up to the literary company his idea keeps, but his loose-jointed, didactic first novel does trace the conflict back to its origins...
...freehand paraphrase of British Poet W. H. Auden, Bachelor Hammarskjold often declares: "Private faces should not be caught in public places"-and for some time after he became U.N. Secretary-General he was dismayed by the extent to which his private face was on public display. But he also inherited, as he once wrote, "a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country-or humanity. This service required sacrifice of all personal interests"-including, it soon became clear, the pleasures of anonymity. Hammarskjold came to recognize that in a job whose prestige comes...
...possibly finer sensitivity to human problems which the mature artist attains through the creative experience, he offers the student a conception of the pertinence of art as well as of the possibility of using knowledge creatively and not merely passively. If such men as Aaron Copland, W. H. Auden, William Faulkner, and Arthur Miller could be encouraged to spend a year at Harvard, delivering lectures, or running a course if they wish, they would be a stimulating addition to the College...